--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: For weeks, Sri Lankans have been out in the streets. A cost-of-living crisis after a pandemic has brought thousands to the streets. They're screaming, "Go home, Gota." Gota, go home.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Gota is alleged war criminal Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the country's president. Home is like literally get out of office. But also, home is weirdly the sunny suburbs of Southern California. That's where Gota lived before becoming president of Sri Lanka.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Gota Bayarajapaksa was doing what anybody does at a Trader Joe's parking lot. He was with his family and he was going on a grocery shopping trip. The economic and political crisis in Sri Lanka and what the United States might do if that country's alleged war criminal president runs back to his house in SoCal. Ahead on Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from the FIFA World Cup. The FIFA World Cup 26 is coming to North America next summer. It is the ultimate celebration of sports and culture. You can get closer to the beautiful game with a hospitality package, closer to the action, the best seats, the best suites, closer to match day and that world-class food and that world-class entertainment, closer to the experience of a lifetime. Book a hospitality package at fifaworldcup.com slash hospitality.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We all have moments where we could have done better, like cutting your own hair. Oh, yikes. Or forgetting sunscreen so now you look like a tomato. Ouch. Could have done better. Same goes for where you invest. Level up and invest smarter with Schwab. Get market insights, education, and human help when you need it. Learn more at schwab.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So Sri Lanka is currently in a severe economic crisis. This is Amita Arudpragasam. She's a policy analyst and writer based in the capital, Colombo.
--:-- Amita Arudpragasam: Yesterday, the central bank governor Nandala Virasinger said that there weren't enough reserves to import essential items even for two weeks. And he warned that the economy would collapse beyond redemption, those are his words, if politicians failed to form a new government within two days to return the country to some sort of political stability.
--:-- Amita Arudpragasam: Due to the pressure from the protests, the prime minister, Mahinda Rajapaksa, was actually compelled to resign. And now the entire Sri Lankan cabinet stands dissolved and there are talks underway to form a new interim government.
--:-- Amita Arudpragasam: That's a big deal. Up until this week, the Rajapaksa family essentially had a chokehold on the entire Sri Lankan government.
--:-- Amita Arudpragasam: The main demands of protesters at these protests has been, of course, not just for the prime minister to resign, but also his brother, the president, Gota Bayarajapaksa, to resign as well.
--:-- Amita Arudpragasam: Some of the slogans include things like "go home, Gota." And I've even seen protesters holding up boards saying that they'd like the president to return back to America because the president was a naturalized citizen of the United States until very recently.
--:-- Amita Arudpragasam: If Sri Lanka's president, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, were to flee Sri Lanka amidst protests and say, return to the United States, where he used to live and up until recently was a naturalized citizen, he'd be presenting the U.S. government with some interesting questions like, is it our responsibility to figure out if this guy is guilty of mass murder and a host of war crimes?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We're going to try and answer that question on the show today, but first we're going to explain who the Rajapaksas are and how they came to run Sri Lanka into the ground.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm going to try and get you up to speed quickly here. The Rajapaksas were born to a prominent political family in Sri Lanka.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Gotabaya Rajapaksa joined the Sri Lankan military in the 1970s. When his brother Mahinda became president of the country in 2005, he made Gotta the Secretary of Defense.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The two of them then set about ending a civil war that had been raging throughout the island for a few decades. That civil war pitted the ethnic Tamil minority against the Sinhalese majority.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The backstory there is long and complicated, but colonialism didn't help. The British favored the Tamils. When Sri Lanka gained independence, the Sinhalese took over. Tamils were underrepresented. That led to conflict.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The Tamil Tigers, a guerrilla force, was born. They wanted an independent state in the northeast of the country. They terrorized civilians. A war began, but the Rajapaksas figured out how to end that war.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They were brutal. Estimates say tens of thousands were murdered. Reports say women and girls were raped to the victor goes to spoils, and it's estimated the Rajapaksa brothers have misappropriated billions of dollars.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And they've been more or less in power ever since. Mahinda was president for 10 years. He's been prime minister a handful of times. Gotabaya became president in 2019, and various other brothers have been in various cabinet positions and littered elsewhere throughout the government.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Despite claims of corruption, nepotism and war crimes, these guys have won election after election after election until maybe now. Now it finally seems like the Rajapaksa era could come to an end.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it won't be a political opponent that really defeats them. It'll be fallout from COVID-19. During the pandemic and after Gautabaya Rajapaksa was elected, the government implemented lots of policies that were very detrimental and actually exacerbated some of Sri Lanka's structural economic weaknesses.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Tax cuts, import substitution policies, a chemical fertilizer ban, which devastated our agricultural yields. And they failed to address any of Sri Lanka's structural weaknesses, including a lower tax to GDP ratio, weak export performance, and so on.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Sri Lanka already had an incredibly high debt to GDP ratio and very low levels of government revenue. So in 2021, about two thirds of our revenue was used to make debt service payments.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And, you know, the tax cuts, for example, shrunk our tax base by about 33%, dropped our tax revenue by about 25%. percent and were incredibly devastating We just didn't have enough revenue to make our debt repayments.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And we started to be shut out of international financial markets when we were consistently downgraded by credit rating agencies that didn't think that we would be able to make good on our payments.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Which is, I imagine, how the protests began? Yeah, exactly. So for at least two months now, protesters across the country, they've been peacefully registering their discontent at Sri Lanka's worsening economic environment.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I came here to show my support for the people who are doing the protest. And also I believe that we need to do our part to stop this corruption.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Sometimes it was people standing in line for gas who just got fed up and started to protest. Sometimes it was individuals in a neighborhood who started putting out placards.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But then these small protests started to escalate when the country experienced drug shortages, fuel shortages and power cuts.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: More than a dozen houses belonging to leading politicians were vandalized. Local TV also showed protesters toppling buses and pushing cars into the water.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In hospitals, for example, the drug shortage meant that surgeries were unable to be performed. People for the last couple of months have been finding it harder and harder to afford food.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We've seen people pawn away their jewelry just to make ends meet. And lots of people, lots of families complaining that they've had to forgo meals so that they can afford other essentials.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that's really where you see these protests attracting in more people. Go, go, go!
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: About two days ago, supporters of Prime Minister Mahindra Rajapaksa, at least he was the Prime Minister then, were bused to his official residence for a show of strength before the Prime Minister was intended to resign.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: His resignation was in part a result of increasing public pressure. And we then saw these pro-government groups attacked two protest sites.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hundreds of ruling party supporters storm an anti-government protest site outside Sri Lanka's presidential office, tearing down tents and attacking its inhabitants.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And a lot of this was caught on tape showing these pro-government groups attacking protesters, including women.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so in the last week following this incident, which was captured and shared widely on social media, retaliatory violence occurred as well.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Police say the violence led to several deaths, including an MP who shot two people when a mob swarmed his car before killing himself.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But the president refuses to resign. He said he would appoint a prime minister, new prime minister, cabinet acceptable to the public within this week and reintroduce a constitutional amendment, which includes some checks and balances on executive power.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He also said he would abolish the executive presidency. But we've seen a state of emergency being imposed, curfews.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And yesterday, we were also told by the defense ministry that the armed forces were now instructed to open fire, if necessary, to quell violence.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There are a lot of parallels, I suppose, between the way the civil war and its aftermath was managed and the way that protesters are being managed.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now, you saw after the end of the war, the Tamil community being alienated and demonized as individuals who could not be trusted as extremists.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that kind of rhetoric was deployed as well against the protesters as politically motivated groups, extremists, radicals.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But if this situation ends anything like the end of the civil war did, then there's a good reason for the Sri Lankan population to be fearful.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That was Amita Arudpragasam from Colombo. In a minute, what happens if this goes the other way? If Gotabaya Rajapaksa is run out of office all the way to California? It's Today Explained.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Today Explained Today Explained Ramas Faram we back
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Immediately before Gotabaya Rajapaksa became president of Sri Lanka he was living the suburban dream in Southern California.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In fact, while he was living in SoCal, some people actually tried to hold him to account for war crimes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In fact, they tried to hold him to account in the parking lot of a Trader Joe's.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And if you were wondering what Gotabaya Rajapaksa was doing in the parking lot of a Trader Joe's in Montrose, California, we asked Ike Sriskandaraja.
--:-- Ike Sriskandaraja: He recently answered that question for a reveal.
--:-- Ike Sriskandaraja: Well, Gautabaya Rajapaksa was doing what anybody does at a Trader Joe's parking lot.
--:-- Ike Sriskandaraja: He was with his family and he was going on a grocery shopping trip.
--:-- Ike Sriskandaraja: The thing that makes him a little different than the rest of the customers is that he was being followed there.
--:-- Ike Sriskandaraja: So this private investigator is following him.
--:-- Ike Sriskandaraja: I do a lot of fraud. I do a lot of missing person cases. And then I do hard serves.
--:-- Ike Sriskandaraja: She's been hired to tail this guy and she specializes in delivering legal documents to people who are especially hard to find.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When I talked to her, she just could barely remember or pronounce his name.
--:-- Ike Sriskandaraja: She said, "So the subject was Gota, and forgive me, I can't not remember his last name."
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Anyway, so she's following him and she's kind of looking over her shoulders.
--:-- Ike Sriskandaraja: She's looking for a secret service detail, some kind of military presence that would protect this high-level military figure.
--:-- Ike Sriskandaraja: But there's nobody. I mean, he's just there with his family in this parking lot.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that's when she decides to move.
--:-- Ike Sriskandaraja: When I got out, I called for his name.
--:-- Ike Sriskandaraja: And when I called his name, he turned around.
--:-- Ike Sriskandaraja: And then when I walked up to him, I noticed his wife was looking at me.
--:-- Ike Sriskandaraja: Who is this person?
--:-- Ike Sriskandaraja: And I went to hand him the envelope, and he reached out to receive it.
--:-- Ike Sriskandaraja: And as soon as I said, "You've been served," he quickly pulled his hand behind his back.
--:-- Ike Sriskandaraja: Since he refused to take it, I just dropped him at his feet.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We got you on tape, sir. You gotta take him. You've been served. Good job. Good job. Good job. Come on. Let's go.
--:-- Ike Sriskandaraja: What is he being served with? What are these legal docs?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, so the contents of that manila envelope contain legal documents for two civil lawsuits.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is an alleged war criminal. Why is it civil?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's a civil lawsuit because for years, these human rights groups who are bringing this lawsuit on behalf of Gota's alleged victims, had wanted the Department of Justice to bring a criminal federal investigation and prosecution from the U.S. government.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And this was really their last-ditch attempt to hold him accountable in a U.S. court.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It happens to be a civil court.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the U.S. government has a really bad track record of ever prosecuting alleged war criminals on U.S. soil.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But we have tried in the United States?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: For decades, the U.S. government has known about alleged war criminals living here, and they have tried for years to try to hold them accountable.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And this really started to become a issue that a lot of people were paying attention to after Nazi war criminals were found living in the U.S. after World War II.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Anyway, this all leads to congressional action.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the president, Jimmy Carter, at the time, launches a new investigative outfit based inside the Department of Justice, a Nazi hunting unit.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We had a Nazi hunting unit?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We had a Nazi hunting unit of great renown, the Office of Special Investigations.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And one of the original Nazi hunters, Eli Rosenbaum, was there at the beginning, and he's still at the Department of Justice now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I interviewed him for this story.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It took our own country nearly 30 years from when the first World War II Nazi criminal was found in the United States to finally launch in 1979 a comprehensive program to identify, investigate and prosecute the cases.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So how did it go? Did it work? Did the Nazi hunting unit accomplish a whole lot of stuff?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah. In some ways, they were incredibly efficient and good at their jobs.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Dozens of Nazi war persecutors were tried in U.S. courts.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And in that way, it was really effective.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And in another way, it was really disappointing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How come?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The charges that were brought against them were only for immigration issues.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that's because genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, those weren't crimes under U.S. law.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How is it that the United States doesn't have laws on the books in the late 70s, early 80s against the greatest crimes man can commit?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's because Congress hadn't passed them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The president hadn't signed them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In the 1990s, I questioned a suspect of ours, Jacob Reimer.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He lived north of New York City and came into the U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He had admitted to participation in genocide, mass murder, and the law just wasn't there.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: All we could do was bid him farewell to go back out of the building and take Metro North home.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There had been members of Congress who had been working on this issue and advocating that we should have these laws for years.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Senator William Proxmar of Wisconsin.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The genocide convention or treaty is pending before the United States Senate.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's in the Foreign Relations Committee.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I feel that we should have passed this treaty long ago.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it's disgraceful that we haven't passed it yet.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But it didn't pass until that senator was just about to retire in 1988.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that was the first time the U passed a what known as substantive human rights law criminalizing genocide.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Huh So we do have these types of laws on the books now We just didn't then We didn't then.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So the genocide statute that criminalized the intentional destruction of an entire group of people, that passed in 1988.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And in the coming years and decades, the U.S. passed other substantive human rights statutes against torture, war crimes, and most recently, as of 2008, the recruitment of child soldiers.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, so by 2008, the United States has a whole host of laws on the books against these kinds of international crimes against humanity.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How often are they pursuing these kinds of cases in the United States?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, the Department of Justice had a pretty big victory after that last human rights statute was passed in 2008.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They had their first conviction under any substantive human rights law.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It was a case against the son of the Liberian dictator Charles Taylor, Chucky Taylor Jr.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He was the first person convicted of any substantive human rights law.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he was convicted of torture and a Florida judge sentenced him to 97 years, which he is currently still serving.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So that's like one instance, one instance of many or that's just the one?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's just the one.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Why is that?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is the United States afraid to prosecute these kinds of crimes because someone might turn around and try and arrest George W. Bush for torture when he like goes to Munich for Oktoberfest or something?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, I think what you're pointing at is that one of the central challenges to this work is U.S. prosecuting international war crimes has a ring of hypocrisy to it because the U.S. is also accused of committing international war crimes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the Department of Justice has never charged U.S. officials using those top-shelf criminal statutes either.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So if Gota leaves Sri Lanka and comes back to the United States, it sounds like it's pretty unlikely that he will stand trial for these alleged war crimes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's unlikely that he would be charged, criminally charged, under these substantive statutes that have never been used for his alleged war crimes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's much more likely that once he loses head of state immunity, that there's a possibility of the civil suits reaching him again.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hmm. What were those civil suits?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: One is from a Tamil man who was detained and accused of the former defense secretary, current president of Sri Lanka, of illegally detaining him and torturing him.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it also contains another lawsuit brought by the family of one of the most prominent and critical journalists who was killed in 2009.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And his family holds the defense secretary responsible for that murder.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The journalist's name is Lisantha Wikramathunga.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Lisantha launched a series of articles accusing the defense secretary, Gota Baya Rajapaksa, of corruption in this complicated arms deal.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Gota then sued him for that and La Santa was supposed to appear in court with more information of the allegations from his investigation but shortly before he was scheduled to appear in court a group of men on motorcycles attacked his car and killed him in the streets of Colombo not far from the Sunday leader.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But just before he died, he actually predicted his own assassination, like on some biggie prophecy-level stuff.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He addressed this letter to the people he held responsible for killing him.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I ended up talking to one of his former colleagues, who was just a young, fledgling cub reporter when she first interviewed with Lysanta to become a reporter at the Sunday Leader.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I asked Darisha if she would mind reading an excerpt of that letter, that final posthumous essay.
--:-- Darisha: I hope my assassination will be seen not as a defeat of freedom, but an inspiration for those who survived to step up their efforts.
--:-- Darisha: Indeed, I hope that it will galvanize forces that will usher in a new era of human liberty in our beloved motherland.
--:-- Darisha: I also hope it will open the eyes of your president to the fact that however many are slaughtered in the name of patriotism, the human spirit will endure and flourish.
--:-- Darisha: Not all the Rajapaksas combined can kill that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Ike Sreeskandaraja is with Reveal over at the Center for Investigative Reporting.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can find Reveal wherever you find Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: His episode about Gotabaya Rajapaksa and prosecuting war crimes and war criminals in the United States dropped just a few weeks ago.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's called My Neighbor, the Suspected War Criminal.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's much longer and way more in-depth than what we could do here today.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's also fascinating. Go listen. I like Ike.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram. I edited today's show with Matthew Collette.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Heidi Mawagdi and Halima Shah produced it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Paul Mounsey engineered.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Laura Bullard fact-checked with help from Tori Dominguez.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thank you for listening.
